How do three guys write one book?

Don’t look for Miles Arceneaux to attend signings for his South Texas novel “Thin Slice of Life.” He is actually three, the creation of John T. Davis, an Austin music journalist who penned the mystery novel jointly with San Antonio attorney James Dennis and Austin tech businessman Brent Douglass.

Don't look for Miles Arceneaux to attend signings for his South Texas novel “Thin Slice of Life,” which publishes Oct. 1. He is actually three.

“He's far more interesting than us,” says John T. Davis, an Austin music journalist who penned the mystery novel jointly with San Antonio attorney James Dennis and Austin tech businessman Brent Douglass. “He's seldom photographed, but much better looking than us.”

The novel opens with the killing of shrimper Johnny Sweetwater after he looks down the wrong hatch on the wrong boat. His brother Charlie comes seeking answers and runs head-on into Col. Nguyen Ngoc Bao, a shady Vietnamese shrimping company owner. A team of dive-bar patrons including an ex-con and a Cajun hustler, Vietnamese émigrés and a Texas Ranger join the search for answers to Johnny's death.

Davis met Douglass in sixth grade at a summer camp run by Davis' grandparents. Dennis and Douglass met while taking philosophy classes at the University of Texas. In 1980, the three started gathering together every Labor Day, first in Rockport. In 1988, after reading “Naked Came the Stranger,” a novel with 24 writers, they began to hatch their own plot.

“We started out to see how hard we could make each other laugh,” Dennis says.

Fifteen years later they got serious. “The Gates of the Alamo” novelist Stephen Harrigan lives across the street from Douglass and made revision suggestions. So did Texas mystery novelist Ben Rehder.

That led to major editing, including the removal of a character named Miles Arceneaux.

How do three guys write a book?

“It takes a lot of patience,” says Douglass, who equates it to a business collaboration. “You've got to check your ego.”

“The other guys' voices get in your head if you write it long enough,” Dennis says.

The disagreements tended to be in the details. For instance, Davis wrote of June bugs appearing in October and his co-writers balked.

The Internet helped as the trio took turns writing chapters and concentrated on their areas of expertise. Famed Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson used to work for Dennis and provided grist for the Ranger in the novel. Douglass speaks Spanish and his grandfather was a shrimper. Davis is adept at the Cajun dialect and is one of Texas' most accomplished music writers.

The completed manuscript proved its mettle by winning first place for mysteries in the Writers' League of Texas contest last year.

The book's title is a line from Guy Clark's song “South Coast of Texas”: “The south coast of Texas, that's a hard slice of life. It's salty and hard. It's as stern as a knife.”

The gritty late '70s setting was chosen because it was a pivotal time on the Texas coast, with Vietnamese refugees taking a strong role in the shrimping trade, Davis says. It's also before a plugged-in Facebook world, so the characters are left more to their own devices to solve the mystery.

The mix of cultures and the laid-back Texas coastal lifestyle also was an attraction.

“Let's just say it doesn't get in Condé Nast magazines,” Douglass said of the Texas coast.

The writerly trio is about 90 percent done with the followup, which involves the discovery and excavation of 17th-century French explorer LaSalle's ship the Belle in Matagorda Bay. Charlie and a few other character from the first novel return.

“We've created a modern-day character who is also French,” Douglass says. “He has a lot of the same character flaws as La Salle.”

Joe O'Connell is an Austin writer. Reach him at therealjoeo@gmail.com.